How to get debugging statements for Android in Eclipse

Question

I've read the lame documentation, and checked other answers. I'd like my Android app to print some debug statements in the logcat window of Eclispe. If I use the isLoggable method on the various types of debug levels on the Log class, I find that WARN and INFO are returning true.

Log.w, and Log.i do not produce any output. Does anyone know which gotchas I've missed?

And just to vent, why should this be hard? I've published apps for iphone and bberry and while appreciate the use of java, the platform is reeking of too many "genuiuses" being involved. I suppose Activities and Intents are very flexible, but why? I just want to put up some screens, take some input and show some results. The bberry pushscreen and popscreen is a lot less pretentious.

Thanks, Gerry

Answer 1

The problem with debugging with Android in Eclipse is that from Eclipse's point of view, you're debugging the emulator and not your specific app. The emulator isn't crashing, so there aren't any logs to show. What you need to use is LogCat, Android's debugging plug-in. See this answer for details on how to bring that up.

Answer 2

It is not clear to me what the problem is. I use "Log.d(TAG, "special message");" all the time in Eclipse in Android code running in the emulator. Since you say "Log.w" gives no output, I assume you already know about the need to import android.util.Log. Otherwise you would not have got even that far.

The only other thing I can think of is for you to check your Eclipse Preferences under Window>Preferences>Android>DDMS (DDMS is needed for Logcat). Make sure the timeout is reasonable (mine defaulted to 5000mS). Make sure the base local debugger port is open, too.